Oceanic Humanities

As traditional disciplines face questions of relevance and survival in an increasingly STEM-dominated academic landscape, Oceanic Humanities offers a new framework for understanding human experience, history, and the environment. By embracing the fluidity of water as a metaphor for shifting identities, the interconnectivity of global maritime routes as a model for cultural exchange, and the ocean as a space experienced primarily through technological mediation – whether via ships, scuba, or remotely operated vehicles – Oceanic Humanities necessitates interdisciplinarity. Crucially, this interdisciplinarity is not a surrender to STEM fields but a necessary collaboration: just as technology allows humans to access the ocean, humanistic inquiry provides the cultural, ethical, and historical frameworks that give meaning to these encounters. STEM needs the humanities as much as the humanities need STEM. At the same time, it revitalizes humanistic inquiry by offering new ways to study narrative, memory, and the cultural histories of peoples shaped by the sea. We invite papers that argue for the transformative potential of Oceanic Humanities in rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing 21st-century challenges, offering innovative perspectives on global issues like climate change, migration, and cultural memory. Papers may address the following topics and/or questions:

The role of Oceanic Humanities in addressing contemporary social and environmental crises;
Oceanic temporality (how water challenges linear, terrestrial conceptions of time);
Underwater media and the representation of submerged worlds;
The sea as a site of labor and resistance;
The ocean as a site of memory, both personal and collective;
The ecological implications of maritime extraction and resource exploitation;
Indigenous narratives and epistemologies of the sea;
The intersection of climate change, environmental collapse, and oceanic spaces in contemporary literary and cultural production;
How oceans shape the ways we narrate histories, construct identities, and imagine alternative futures.